


(In)visibility

by A_Tired_Writer



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Basically they don't shack up right at the end of the war, Emotional Baggage, Eventual Romance, F/M, Fire Emblem: Three Houses Blue Lions Route, Getting Together, Healing, I don't know you've played the blue lions route you know what's going on, Missing Scene, but like multiple missing scenes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:49:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26730922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Tired_Writer/pseuds/A_Tired_Writer
Summary: As the moon changed, so did Faerghus' prince.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/My Unit | Byleth
Comments: 5
Kudos: 79





	(In)visibility

No one ever wished to admit they could be wrong. In a life such as theirs, there was only what you believed, what horrified you, and what you could offer a blind eye. “Right” and “wrong” were as easy to capture as water in one’s palms; there was an idea, an image, that slowly slipped between your fingers, back into the pool from which you had taken it.

Looking at Annette, tightly clutching her side that had sustained a wound courtesy of a poisoned arrow, Byleth wanted to say they were wrong. Let Edelgard do what she wanted. Anything to stop them from getting hurt. Her students, the children who had once looked at her with the smallest stars in their eyes, ready to burn in their perfect fury, reduced to—

Byleth could not name what they had become. Soldiers? Fighters?

No, that was not quite right. _Broken toys_. They had all become a little broken, everyone from a general to a foot soldier in complete lack of control over their person. Byleth had shuffled each of them around like piece on a chessboard, but she had been away from the game too long. She was lost. _They_ were lost.

Their guide, their leader, was wholly blinded, and it was not because the sky was a tangled mess of navy thread and barely-there stars. The moon was looking at them with one eye open, a listless cat only intrigued enough to give them half its attention.

“Annette?”

Annette’s head jerked up, fatigued smile tugging at her lips. “Professor! Did you need something? If it’s about that Excalibur situation, I know, I’m sorry—I should have seen those peg knights, but I thought His Highness was in trouble—!”

“Annette.”

Annette blinked, eyes too big and too bright and too _trusting._ “Yes, Professor?”

“I wanted to ask if you were alright.”

Again, a couple of blinks, before Annette was sloughing her off. “Oh, please, this? I’ve never felt better! Those Imperial soldiers can’t aim to save their lives—literally.” Annette faltered at the gruesomeness of her own joke. “Felix is okay, too. Turns out he had one more Thoron up his sleeve.”

He hadn’t. Felix had gone to Mercedes, wincing, having overextended himself in taking out Annette’s attacker. Byleth did not say that Felix had acted on instinct, to protect Annette. An instinct that had nearly incapacitated him. He hadn’t undone the bandages hidden under his sleeves, but there would be numerous lightning-shaped scars crawling over the expanse of his arm when they were removed.

Instead, Byleth said, “You’ll be okay to depart at first light?”

Annette forced herself to perk up. “I’m raring to go right now! Just give the word, Professor!”

“Sadly, Felix needs a little more time to recover.”

Byleth knew amber eyes were narrowing in her direction, that she’d lied for the millionth time in the past week, but she could not regret it; Annette’s relaxation was all too genuine, and Byleth knew she’d made the right choice. Annette would not stay put for herself, but she would for any one of her friends.

“Rest up, Annette. Felix might need you to save him tomorrow.”

The glare at the side of her neck doubled in heat. Annette grinned, unbidden. “You got it, Professor. I’ll give it my all!”

 _Look what you’ve done to them_ , Byleth thought as she passed her tired soldiers, her bedraggled students. _Look what’s become of them._

 _Look what’s become of_ him.

He had grown so _tall_ while she’d been away. His shoulders were wide—though never wide enough to bear his burdens, it seemed—and his hands scarred. He had become someone different.

 _Something_ different.

As always, he recognized her presence; as always, he ignored it.

She would not let that stand.

His eyes were downcast, his blood-covered hands hung between his knees as he stared off into nothing, likely being berated by one voice or another. He did not look up when he spoke. “You are not dead, yet you insist on haunting me as if you were a ghost.”

She didn’t know how she was meant to respond to that.

“Why?”

That, she could have answered, if she’d been given the time, but Dimitri was not in the giving mood. “It does not matter. You’ll be dead sooner or later.”

“Because you’ll kill me?”

Dimitri gave a full-bodied flinch at that. As if . . . As if he was somehow hurt by that.

Hope bloomed in her chest, bright and full like a sunflower and just as eager to know the warmth of the sun coloured like Dimitri’s hair.

It was cut off at the stem when Dimitri shrugged. “Such has been the pattern thus far. You may be exceptional, but you are not immune to me.”

Stunned, all Byleth could say was “To _you?”_

“You do not see it. Around me there is an _air_. It kills and it suffocates and it burns. Everyone in it will fall, whether it is on a battlefield or not.”

So he was aware of the sacrifice Annette had made. “You don’t get to discredit her like that. She made her own decision. A task you are seemingly incapable of.”

“The wishes of the dead are my burden, Professor. It is you lot who have concerned yourselves with their messenger.”

She wished she were only angry with him. It would make this whole ordeal easier—she could cuff him over the head and drag him back to Faerghus without so much as a second thought to how he was faring.

But.

_But._

She cared. She kicked herself every time she acquiesced to one of his inane commands, because she thought, _This is the one. This will be the decision he regrets. Then he will_ see _he needs to go home._

That decision never came. It was only more bloodletting, more violence, more harrowed mutterings. More of the same.

When he lifted his head, his face was cast in the partial shadows of the moon—and she had to withhold her gasp. Half his face was covered in darkness, realer than the one that usually clung to his shoulders, the other bared to the bleaching light in all its imperfect, deplorable beauty.

She could not tell which side was the beast and which was the man. All she knew was that it would take more than a nation in need to bring out the latter.

She just didn’t know what it _would_ take.

-

Wind whistled through exposed beams and chipped marble, dropping the sighs of the clouds onto the cracked floor, only to lose them amongst the final breaths of the dead. The moon was but a slight arch of ivory in the sky, swathing the decimated alter in shadow and patchy light. The greatest shadow of them all hardly shifted, head hunched and hands shaking every other breath.

That shadow had been painted in gold and cobalt, once, though that felt like nothing more than a pleasant dream. A falsehood. A delusion as poisonous as the ones that currently plagued the shadowed prince. It seemed impossible that he had been real, when there was nothing but a series of memories to prove his existence.

Perhaps he had never existed at all.

She wished the moon were in its new phase, or even shining in its full glory—not this half-there, half-not trickery, where she was left to trace the lines of his shoulders from her memory, forced to watched every shudder that wracked his frame with a painful precision. It was not fair. Not to her, not to him; not to the people relying on him, and certainly not those who had come to his roaring call.

She was infuriated with him.

She could say nothing of the sort.

It was killing her, and this was not a blow to deflect or a spell to avoid. This was a slow death, against which she had no defence.

“Have you come to watch me unravel, Professor?”

More present than her infuriation, than her frustration, was a nagging guilt that only set to anger her further. She felt guilty, watching Dimitri become _this_ , but there was nothing she could have done differently. It was a miracle she was here at all, and even that was doing precious little deter Dimitri off his warpath.

Moonlight slunk across the floor as the clouds shifted. She had to remind herself that it was not blood surrounding the prince, only darkness.

She cursed the moon and its weak light.

“I have not been your professor for years.”

When Dimitri turned, he was horrendously monstrous and impossibly human in the same breath, hackles raised and teeth bared with heartache sketched across his eyes in an intricate web. He was coated in them, those webs, spun from blood-stained silk and frayed threads of his soul.

His voice was a great cracking of earth when he next spoke. “Would you rather hear your name from the lips of a beast?”

For the first time in days, Dimitri moved from his spot near the front of the church for something other than the promise of blood. He did not make it farther than the first few pews.

She removed her hand from the hilt of her sword.

“You are wasting your breath, _Byleth_.”

Without her behest, her bones shuddered. There was such hate laced into those two syllables, and she could not decide for whom it was meant.

Dimitri did not notice, or did not care, or quietly relished in it. “You are in the middle of a war. You should not waste those breaths, when you have so little to give.”

“Are you not fighting that very same war?”

Dimitri’s grin was that of a wolf, sharp and toxic and dreadful. “Beasts do not know war, Professor, only destruction and blood. For them it is no different than food and water.”

“Then I should consider myself lucky you are nothing of the sort.”

It was a weighty lie on her tongue, and his turning around said he agreed. “Your naïveté is repulsive.”

She had no rebuttal. He was right. Because her anger was quiet, because she bit down on her tongue twice as much as she spoke, she could not tell him how much she hurt, seeing him like this—how badly she wanted to chew him out for talking to her former students in the manner he did.

She did not know if she would be heard over the voices in his head.

A stray ember flew from her lips, the smallest indication of how brightly the inferno of her rage burned. “Once you stop playing dress-up in the hide of a beast, Dimitri, you can come reclaim your throne.” Before she walked back out the doors, she said, “But do not assume that throne will remain unbroken when you choose to return.”

Knowing there was no response in her future, Byleth made for her old room under the watch of a coy moon. For all she cared, it could fall right out of the sky right into the Eternal Flames. Perhaps then she could feel at peace. At the very least, she could sob out her pain without its gaze pinned to her tears.

-

The only light for miles came from the smouldering ground around them, from the misfired spells that had caught on the greenery speckling Gronder. It was the only light one could hope to find in the throes of war, for even the stars could not shine through the smoke, and the moon had bid her goodbyes to the world yesterday.

 _Yesterday._ It had been so normal. Or, she supposed, as normal as life could be when violence hummed in their blood as happily as any choirgirl. They had been making their way to Gronder, dreading the clash with the Imperial army. With those who had once been, simply, the Black Eagles.

How simple things had been then.

Byleth had met up with Claude before all of his generals— _kids, kids she’d_ taught _—_ were slaughtered. Dimitri would not spare them, but he would not give them a passing glance if they moved out of his way.

With one glance in Dimitri’s direction, equal parts worried and calculatingly distrustful, he’d flown over the copse of trees, Hilda and the rest at his heels. The bloodthirsty prince was a spectacle, though it was not one they wished to witness any longer.

Felix was currently leaning against the flank of Sylvain’s mount, the paladin atop it clenching his jaw in a frustration that burned just as hot as the landscape around them. Mercedes was healing a gash in Ingrid’s mount while Ashe offered up a vulnerary to Annette. The absence of a seventh general stung like a knife driving into her side. Bodies were strewn across the ground, as common a sight as grass. Some bore Faerghus blue. Others wore gold. There was red, so much red, but Byleth couldn’t tell if they were Imperial colours or the signature of death.

Edelgard had retreated. Dimitri, wounded and bruised and exhausted, would not let her get far.

But then there was silver glinting in the firelight, a sorry substitute for the absent moon, and Rodrigue was choking around his last breath.

Byleth saw the split second in which Dimitri revealed himself. Not the boy she’d known, not the animal she’d come to know, but the man. The man Dimitri had never been given a chance to become. He was terrified of the thought of losing another loved one, and it was that image alone that had Byleth propelling forward.

When Rodrigue’s eyes went dim and his hands limp, Dimitri let out a heartbroken howl. It dragged against his throat, piercing the sky. There were no birds to scare away, but there were a few among their ranks that flinched at the sound. It was pure suffering, laying heavy in Byleth’s heart.

His hands scrabbled at his face, uncaring that he was smearing blood into his cheeks and brow. He dislodged his eyepatch, showcasing his scar like the rivers of lava in the Valley. There was a new wetness to his cheeks, glowing like embers in the firelight. The rest of his silhouette was thrown into shadow, teeth clenched around his sobs.

Her frustration with him had been a tangible thing for months. Every time he had brushed them off, spat at them, hollered that he would leave them for dead, she’d wanted to curse him out.

But this . . . this was _Dimitri._ This was what had lived in tandem with the illness and the rage and the sorrow. This was what had lost out against the beast, time and time again. What Rodrigue had wanted her to cultivate.

“Dimitri.”

He dug his teeth into his palm, stifling the ragged sobs spilling from his lips. He was not ready.

And so she waited. Their troops moved out, back over the borders of Gronder to rest for the night. When Sylvain and Dedue came to collect Rodrigue’s body, Dimitri did not move, did not so much as flinch. He was too consumed by his melancholy, by the slowly growing darkness as the fires flickered out. The stars did not have the courage to come out to play, not when smog and cinder splayed against the sky.

When his sobs died out and they were surrounded by pitch-black twilight, Byleth shuffled forward on her knees. It was difficult not to feel bigger than him, kneeling like this. His shoulders were wider, his height more substantial, but he was _small_ , like this.

“Dimitri.”

His breath left him in a rush, sinking down even further with his head in his hands. “What have I done?”

“You’ve made a series of pretty big mistakes,” she told him, “but it is not too late to fix them.”

“Why do you keep saying these things? I am beyond redemption, Professor. Why do you insist on torturing me with the prospect that I may be?”

“Stop it.”

 _He’s hurting_ , she reminded herself. But this couldn’t go on _._ “Dimitri, you are a leader of an army in a war. You do not have time to be _redeemable_.”

He lifted his head, his blue eyes near-glowing in the darkness. “Would you have me become her?”

“No,” Byleth said, startlingly soft, “but you are the foundation to this fight. If you waver, the entire tower crumbles.”

“What fight, Professor?” he asked with a voice barely louder than the wind coming through the scorched trees. “There has been my tirade, and what else?”

“The fight for your home. Your throne is not yet broken, Dimitri. There is still time to reclaim it.”

“Professor . . .”

She was close. She heard the waver in his voice—the one that meant _change._ “You said, once, that you and I were the same. Both monsters, both killers, both irredeemable. And you were right. There is enough blood on my hands to fill a river, just as there is enough on yours. But that does not mean I can let the current of that river determine the rest of my life. We were not so lucky as to have a peaceful life, Dimitri, but we are fortunate enough to have the chance to put an end to the fighting. You have made terrible decisions, regrettable mistakes. But they do not define you. What you do now, how you choose to continue this fight, will determine your future.”

His breath hitched. “Why . . . ?”

She thought she knew what he meant. “Because I care for you, Dimitri, and it has been excruciating, these last few months, watching you torture yourself and others. You are not your mistakes, so long as you do your best to rectify them. As it stands now, you are nothing more than a bloodthirsty war criminal.” She swallowed down her guilt, watching him sink down even further into himself. “When you step off this battlefield, you can either work to earn back your throne, or deliver the final blow to your people.”

“What if . . . what if they don’t want me ruling over them?”

“Then they will deserve the fate that befalls them, because you are the ideal leader to guide them through this war.”

Dimitri barked a laugh, shaking his head. “Am I to add false flattery to the list of your faults?”

“If they turn away your aid,” Byleth said carefully, “then they will deeply regret it when there is no monarch upon their throne to spill the blood of their enemies, and protect theirs from being spilled in return.”

“You’re saying I should dig my claws into what used to be my birthright?”

She ignored the irritated twitch of her brow. “I am saying that it is _still_ your birthright. I am saying that you have done some deplorable things. You have drawn more blood than is your right in this war. You have been cruel to your comrades for no other reason than you have been alone this past half decade. I am _saying_ that you can choose to change that. Choose to not be alone. Choose to ask the people of Faerghus, your comrades, your _friends_ , for their forgiveness. Choose to be worth their faith, Dimitri, because your heart is good and your soul strong, but they have both taken quite a few hits during this war.” She focused on her hands. “I have a great deal of faith in you. And I only make tactically sound decisions.”

Not true. She’d used and abused Sothis’ gift of time manipulation, but Dimitri did not have to know that. But this was not a choice for which she would bend the hands of a clock. There was no light around them, but Dimitri was shimmering, a piece of his soul glowing like dawn’s first light when he met her gaze.

“Will you help me?”

His voice was small enough to break her heart. With a deep breath, she gave an equally small response. “That is all I ever hoped to do, Dimitri.”

The sky was bottomless, infinite, its only star living behind Dimitri’s eyes—and it would be one to light the path to Faerghus’ brightest future.

-

The fighting had ended with a lance to the heart and a final tear in memory of everything that could have been. The trek back to Faerghus had been slow, painful, exhausting. But they had made it.

They had _made it_.

Things were still in disarray—Dimitri was now the king of _Fódlan_ , with treaties to sign and reconstructions to plan. Her former students were now priestesses and dukes and knights, some of them crossing her paths more than others.

Perhaps it was that disarray that had given her the courage to come here.

“You look nice without three inches of dirt and blood on you.”

She was not wrong to say what she had; Dimitri _did_ clean up nicely, with his long hair pinned back and an extravagant eyepatch sitting in for his worn black one. His pale skin glowed with steam from the shower, clean and perfect in all its tiny blemishes. The moon was just shy of its full glow, filling the room with a tender, pale light. Faerghus had lost its prince, she thought, but there was something to be said about the majesty of the man before her. They would warm up to him, in time.

But when he smiled at her, smiled _like that_ , she had a hard time imagining Dimitri had changed at all.

“If we’re being candid, Professor, I think I’d forgotten what it was like to feel clean.”

Byleth nodded, all too sympathetic. “I spent three hours scrubbing down, then four hours in a bath. I think there’s still some dirt under my nails.” She frowned at the offensive dark spots on her hands. “I can’t say this is the first time this has happened, though.”

“I find it charming,” Dimitri said softly, clearly to himself. “You’ve always been so strong. Even at the Academy, you always had grease on your wrist or a bandage around your arm. You never stopped giving it your all. Giving _me_ your all.”

He started, blinked as his eyes dimmed with guilt. “Ah, I mean to say—”

Byleth stepped forward then, resisting the temptation to take both of his hands in hers, and let out a sigh that had been building up for nearly a year. “Dimitri.”

“I realize this is a bad time,” he interjected, “but I really do like it when you say my name.”

Byleth smiled at her feet, shaking her head. “You’re going to be busy, rebuilding Faerghus and the rest of Fódlan. _I_ am going to be busy learning how to run a religion.” Already the implications of her position were weighing down on her shoulders, demanding she bow her head. “But . . . I like to think that, once things settle down a little, I’ll be welcome back?”

Ever since she’d woken up in that river, Dimitri had been a constant. There had been her overflowing anger with his reluctance to change, her guilt at having been gone from him for so long, that new fluttering in her stomach when she stared at the lines of his figure and saw _Dimitri_ instead of _Saviour King_ or _Beast Prince_. It would be strange, not looking to her left or behind her and seeing him there, but they had responsibilities now—ones that went beyond each other and the fight for their home.

That did not mean she couldn’t want to come back.

“Everything that is mine is yours, Professor. If you had not been there to—to help me, to guide me back, I’ve no doubt I would have been run through with a sword by now.” His smile was shaky on his lips, bright like a star.

No, she realized, this was a steadier glow. More subdued, but surer.

She was glad her head was bent, because while her heart was nothing but a useless lump in her chest, her expression felt too soft. Too breakable.

“I suppose I’ll have to take you up on that offer, won’t I?”

Dimitri’s smile grew. “I would find myself disappointed if you didn’t.”

She decided now was the best time to leave, for if she spent another moment in his company, she would not want to leave.

“Byleth?”

Again, that fluttering, that was lower in her chest than where her heart should be. “Hm?”

She faced him and barely withheld a small _Ah._ The moon hung above his head, a sliver of light missing, giving him a faint halo. His shoulders were thrown into stark black lines, his hair falling around his face in a silky curtain, but his _face—_ it was the glow of a proud man. Someone who had everything to lose.

Her moon prince.

“Thank you,” he whispered. “For everything you have done for me, from the moment we met to this very second—thank you _._ You, who looked at me and saw something worthwhile, even when no one else wished to come near me.”

She offered him her own smile, cracking open the door. “No intelligent person looks to the moon and shuns its light, Dimitri.”

His brows bunched together, and even Byleth had to admit her words were a touch _too_ cryptic.

But, she thought, he was no less handsome when he was perpetually confused.

-

She hadn’t seen Dimitri in months, the king having left for a treaty signing on the Faerghus-Duscur border a few days prior to Byleth’s arrival. He had left a letter for her, saying that he would make for Fhirdiad as soon as was deemed polite, to which Byleth could only offer a fond shake of her head. Dimitri would always give equal importance to his loved ones and his royal duties. It was both a reassuring constant and a refreshing change.

Despite their constant missing each other, they had kept in touch. Dimitri’s dignified penmanship had become more commonplace than certain sermons she gave, and it was that familiarity that made it easy to reread certain letters when the days dragged on too long, when the gazes pinned to her every twitch were too sharp. His bumbling sometimes made its way into his letters, words scribbled out with explicit instructions to _please disregard what he’d omitted._ It seemed the Saviour King wrote before he thought. She wished that were not enough to make her smile into her palm.

Some of those scratched-out words were tenderly written, glaring up at Byleth with enough intensity that her eyes caught on them, reading them over and over until her eyelids bore their glowing impression.

She shook off her reminiscence like droplets of water, heading through winding halls until she stood in the drawing room. Dimitri would not be back for some time, but his staff said his arrival was scheduled for later in the evening.

Why had she come so early? It wouldn’t have hurt her to wait until she received correspondence from Dimitri that he’d arrived back in Fhirdiad.

Except that it would have hurt _some_ part of her, and she was in no mood to dissect that. She just wanted to see Dimitri as soon as possible, she reasoned, because she wanted to see how he was doing. They had spent months at each other’s side, only to make their way down separate paths at the earliest opportunity.

She sighed, dropping her head back against the back of the chaise she’d sat down on.

“Archbishop?”

She sat up with a start, fingers itching for a blade even as her mind nagged her that she knew the voice.

“Ingrid,” she said with a tangible relief. “I didn’t think I would run into anyone here.”

Ingrid dipped her chin in understanding. “Felix and Dedue are off with His Majesty, Sylvain is doing his best to work out the complications with the Sreng border—Mercedes, I think, is one smile away from becoming High Priestess.”

Byleth rubbed her fingers at her temple. “Do you think I can convince her to take Archbishop?”

Ingrid’s lips twitched. “I do not think so, _Archbishop_.”

“It was worth a try.” Byleth righted herself, recalling all the lessons Seteth had snapped at her on decorum and _the image of the church._ “How are you, Ingrid?”

“I’m well, actually. His Majesty offered me a place among his ranks. Initially, I didn’t think to take it, but the position right below Dedue’s comes with a rather impressive wage. My father has benefitted from it thus far.”

There was no position below Dedue’s, Byleth thought, unless Dimitri had made her nothing more than a guard—but, no, those pins attached to her chest were nothing like those of the guards who were stationed around the castle. Dimitri had made her a knight, and all without sacrificing her family’s wellbeing.

How far he had come. How far he surely had left to go.

With a small bow, Ingrid mentioned the need to check over the training grounds, leaving Byleth alone once more. The silence was both calming and excruciating, accenting each of her thoughts with a startling clarity. Sat here, in Dimitri’s castle, that clarity was a blessing as well as a curse. For the first time in a while, she wished she did not know half the things she did, least of all about herself.

“For a heart that doesn’t beat,” she muttered, “you’re certainly causing me a lot of problems.”

“Bronze piece for your thoughts, Professor?”

Cursing the sense of comfort she’d learned since the end of the war, Byleth was once again left to twist her head around to confirm that the new voice was not, in fact, a threat. How long had she been sitting here?

Dimitri stood there, smile soft on his face. Dedue nodded politely before taking up his post outside the room. All she saw of Felix was a wisp of his navy hair as he fled down the corridor.

Dimitri faced the same direction, letting loose a fond sigh. “I think he’s had his fill of all things politics and manners. Do not take it personally, Professor.”

“Last we talked, you called me Byleth.”

His cheeks took on a fair bit of colour as he cast a worried glance at the doors. When he turned back, there was a wavering fire in his eyes. “Follow me.”

She stood to do just that, but— “Will Dedue not want to accompany you?”

“That man has done nothing but that these past few days. He deserves a break.”

“Would a break not mean his retiring to his chambers?”

“If these years have taught me anything, Professor, it is that I must pick and choose my battles. Telling Dedue to _go to bed_ is not one I am currently in the state to fight.”

“Byleth,” she corrected.

Dimitri turned his face so she could not see his expression. “Byleth.”

Goddess above, he said it with such care that she feared she may trip over her own feet. What had become of the Ashen Demon?

Apparently there was a secret latch that propped open the eastern wall of the drawing room, revealing a shadowed pathway.

She turned an accusatory glare on Dimitri. “You’re using the emergency passages without alerting your guard?”

He had the decency to look embarrassed. “I think your presence warrants such drastic measures.”

It was infuriating, how easily he’d reduced her to shocked silence. Telling herself she was only following him for his safety, Byleth ducked in after him.

Their trip through the tunnels was not overly long, in retrospect, and it ended with them stood atop a balcony, looking over the frozen lake on the southern edge of the castle grounds. The moon was high in the sky, plump like a fresh berry and nearly painful to look at with how valiantly it shone. In its light Dimitri seemed like a porcelain figure, achingly perfect.

But then he was turning to face her, revealing his scar and his eyepatch, half his face now in shadow, and he was beautiful not for his perfection, but for his lack of it.

Beautiful.

What a word _that_ was.

“These past few months,” he said, quietly enough to be mistaken for snow cascading down from the roofs of the castle, “I have been wondering what it would be like, to be a man worth your admiration.”

Her breath was frozen in her chest, even quieter than her heart. One twitch and she would disrupt whatever courage Dimitri had scrounged up for himself.

“And then I thought on what that meant. You were not wholly happy with me during the war—and you were within your right to do so. But it is just that . . . I do not wish to _please you_ , so much as I wish to be someone you, Byleth, would respect. You have always seen what is best in me, while remembering everything about me that is unpleasant.” He looked to the lake, a frost-covered mirror of the sky. There, the moon shone like a star, hazy around the edges and impossibly bright. “Sometimes I think I hear them. I can’t tell if they’re coming back, or if I simply cannot go too long without torturing myself.”

Still, she could not speak—had not been able to for a while now.

“In those moments, I think of you, because I know you would tell me the facts. You would not coddle me, yet you would not leave me for dead. I want to be a man that does not leave you with such a choice.” His cheeks darkened. It _was_ cold, she reasoned. “And then I realized that I wanted to be a man worth your _love_.”

So, not the cold, then.

“I did not want tonight to be the night I said this,” he whispered, “but then I realized I would never think myself worthy of you. I realized that only you, Byleth, could tell me if I am too bold or not bold enough.”

Now he faced her, face pinched. “Your silence is alarming.”

“Um.”

Eloquent.

Dimitri deflated, smiling sardonically as he tilted his head back. “Ah, I see. Too bold. Forgive me, Professor.”

The title nicked a little hole in her heart, and that cut grew and grew as she saw him turn away.

“You’re brilliant.”

He stopped, likely stunned she’d spoken at all. Now that she had said something worthwhile, she could not stop. “You were an intelligent commander of your forces. You’re a generous, _fair_ king, and just the man to lead this continent back into something resembling peace. You asked Ignatz if you could commission him to do your royal portrait, after your coronation. You acted as a target for the mages, and every time you did so, I could see how much they’d improved. Aiming at dummies will never compare to sparring.”

“Some of those instances were a lie.”

Byleth shook her head vehemently, even if he could not see it. “That’s not true. You may have put on airs, Dimitri, to be a perfect prince, but you were not a different person. For a majority of the time we’ve known each other, you _have_ been worth my admiration.” She swallowed her nerves. “And, recently, you’ve become worth my . . . love, as well.”

Slowly, he spun around, and in the full light of night, it was so clear to her, the nature of her fluttering heart around him. _Love._ Somewhere between that shadow-heavy night on Gronder and now, here, she had fallen for him. Foolishly, perhaps, but it had happened. She had made her bed, and now she had to lay in it.

“You are not . . .” Dimitri clamped his lips shut, taking a moment to collect himself. “You are not merely saying that?”

She pretended that did not hurt. “I may be a newcomer to expressing how I feel, but do give me some credit.”

His eyes widened, and suddenly he was in front of her, keeping a stubborn foot of distance between them. “No! No, I would never. It is just . . . I had not imagined tonight would go like this.”

Emboldened by his energy, Byleth finally bracketed her hands around his, steadying herself with their rough warmth. She recalled the night she’d caught him in the rain, drenched and newly miserable and angry with the world, with himself, and marvelled how much they had both changed.

His hair was strewn with snow-white moonlight, leaving him with a totally different crown than the deep gold one he usually wore. This was made of scars and hope and wonderment, bright on his head and reminding her of the little glimpses of his true heart she’d caught throughout their time together. The boy who wanted to teach the orphans swordplay; the haggard beast who had taken on a little girl hellbent on avenging her brother; the king who had plans to demands ludicrous taxes of the wealthy in hopes that he could begin fixing Fódlan’s poverty. That, she thought, was the person that made her smile secretly into her palm. _That_ was the person she loved.

When he leaned down to kiss her, it was bright and warm and calming, the slightest brush of his lips against hers.

“Thank you,” he whispered, a hair’s breadth from her mouth, “for always seeing me.”

Lips curling into a bright grin, she let her shoulders relax and her heart soar. There was a new glow to him, one of happiness and _hope._ The moon could not hope to compare, not even when it was full and hung in the sky as it was. “It’s hard not to, when you shine so brightly.”


End file.
